• Oracle Software Rebounds, Hardware Struggles

  March 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Oracle’s software business deflated a bit in its second quarter of fiscal 2012 ended back in November 2011, but software was on the rebound in the third quarter ended in February and the company remained hopeful about its long-term prospects in the systems business thanks to its “engineered systems” and despite its backing out of commodity server and storage sales that don’t make it any money. In the quarter, which had an extra day in it thanks to leap year, Oracle’s revenues were up 3 percent, to just a hair over $9 billion. Of that, software license, update, and support

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• Flashback: Clearly A Mainframe, Nearly The Perfect One

  March 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  TFH Back in September 1992, when the E95 quad-processor AS/400 came out and IBM was in the midst of a major reorganization as its mainframe business was imploding and Lou Gerstner was about six months away from being named the first outside CEO of Big Blue in its history, I jotted down a wish list of the things that I thought IBM needed to do to make the AS/400 a more general purpose platform. Back then, The Four Hundred was only available as a paper newsletter on a subscription basis, so very few of you have ever read this wish

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• Two Factors In The IBM i Migration Equation

  March 26, 2012 Alex Woodie

  There comes a time in every corporation’s life when it must confront the “m” word and consider migrating computer systems. Whether the company uses Windows or IBM i or Unix or z/OS, its leaders will inevitably make a decision to either stick with what they’ve got, or move to something different. Companies running IBM i face a unique set of circumstances that work both ways in the migration equation, including a skills shortage and sticky ERP systems. The mad rush toward mobile, cloud, and social computing has IBM i shops re-thinking their business application strategy. Just as IBM i professionals

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• COMMON Reactivates RPG Certification

  March 26, 2012 Dan Burger

  Ever since IBM dropped its RPG certification program in 2009, the IBM i community has had one of the few programming languages without an official marker for technical proficiency gained through education and experience. So after instigating a certification program more than three years ago and rolling out two business computing professional certifications, COMMON decided to update the abandoned RPG certification and make it available once again. It is expected to be available for the first time at the upcoming COMMON 2012 Annual Meeting and Exposition scheduled for May 6 through 9 in Anaheim, California. COMMON has appointed a group

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• Server Transitions Give Internal Storage Arrays Sales A Breather

  March 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, I walked you through the latest statistics from Gartner regarding sales of external disk arrays. Gartner’s public information only covers outboard storage arrays, not the internal disk arrays that are still common among SMB customers. IDC‘s public data covers total storage array sales as well as external array sales, which means we can calculate what’s happening with internal arrays. Let’s start with the broadest data and drill down from there. IDC reckons that in the fourth quarter, across all array types and no matter where they are located–under a server’s

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Mobile IBM Has Apps, But With Gaps

  March 26, 2012 Hesh Wiener

  In February, IBM bought Worklight, an outfit that has a multi-platform mobile applications development system used to build, deploy, and manage their mobile apps. IBM expects Worklight’s technology to help it sell mobile solutions to a market moving faster than a certain elephant has been dancing. IBM acted just in time. It desperately needs first class mobile apps to keep its Lotus division from getting crushed by competitors and to reinforce a number of its other division’s offerings, too. Big Blue’s big problem won’t be easy to solve. IBM’s current roster of mobile apps is good in an unforgiving

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• The Definite Article, No Doubt About It

  March 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  People are hierarchical beings, and they definitely have patterns in their speech that are tell-tale signs of deference and respect. So here’s a funny question for the day: How many products can you think of where the name of the object has the definite article “the” in front of it? He isn’t just the Pope because there’s only one, and someday some general won’t grumble, “Get me the President,” just because she is the one who was elected and lives in the White House. People called the first practical car the Model T, and in my family at least, its

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• Five Handles For The Mobile Application Pot

  March 26, 2012 Dan Burger

  Developing mobile applications that access IBM i data have caused a wheel to come off more than one development team wagon. If it’s happened to you, you’re not alone. The widespread popularity of smartphones and tablets in the business world has violated the comfort zones of countless IT departments in the IBM midrange. Enough so that the debris and the success stories can be assembled into an article, which managers can use to better plan future projects. Consider this as a five-step problem-solving exercise. Begin with the belief that this can be done and should be done from an IBM

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• JDE Throwdown: IBM i Versus Oracle Stacks

  March 26, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last fall, I told you all about Oracle‘s database appliances and its desire to pitch its new Sparc T4 series of Solaris servers running its eponymous database against various IBM Power-based midrange gear. Oracle, as the owner of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne suites, is particularly interested in pitching the Sparc T4 machines against entry and midrange Power7 iron running IBM i. So how does Oracle stack up? I promised that I would try to figure this out back in October, when Oracle launched the eight-core Sparc T4 processors and the servers that use them. The Sparc T4 machines come

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• Four Simple Rules For IBM i PTF Management

  March 21, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  Talking with an IBM Business Partner this week, the conversation turned to PTF management and the best ways for managing cumulative PTFs. Inspired by this talk, I came up with these four simple rules for a good PTF management strategy. Rule 1: Don’t Let Your PTFs Age A lot of shops only apply PTFs when they upgrade their hardware, but many (or most) shops are also frequently upgrading their application software. Frequent application changes can create new processing situations that test the limits of a partition’s Licensed Internal Code (LIC) and operating system fixes. In a rapidly changing applications environment,

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